Joshua Lifton: Crowd Supply

The Anarchist Organic Cookbook for Product Development

The way products are designed, manufactured, paid for, and delivered is rapidly changing, driven by the same forces at play in the slow food, sharing economy, and open source software movements. See what happens when transparency becomes a core tenet of product development. I'll be talking about Crowd Supply, a company I co-founded to explore these ideas by helping people create products in a new way. I'll give a broad overview of Crowd Supply and then dive into several case studies of products created through Crowd Supply. This is a story about building things the way they should be built.

Josh received his doctorate from the MIT Media Lab and holds a BA in physics and mathematics from Swarthmore College, which is to say he's devoted a significant amount of his time learning how to make things that blink. As head of Crowd Supply's project efforts, he is helping others do the same. Prior to Crowd Supply, Josh worked in a variety of technology settings, from instrumenting thousands of audience members with custom wearable computers for a Cirque du Soleil performance to, most recently, serving as head of engineering at Puppet Labs.